Sports Science

「図鑑御三家」の一角をなす有名昆虫図鑑の監修を任され、著者は理想に燃えた。「子供たちのために死んだ虫（標本）ではなく生きたままの虫を撮って載せたい！」そんな学習図鑑は前代未聞だ。

By the Fall of 1966, Syracuse had become a city at the crossroads–literally and figuratively. Situated at the geographic heart of New York and the intersection of two all-new interstate highways, the city found itself on a collision course with not only time, but circumstance.

In 1963, the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James posed the deceptively benign question: "What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?" A challenge to the public to reconsider cricket and its meaning by placing the game in its true social, political, and economic context. Different Class does not simply challenge the widely accepted orthodoxy of English cricket, it demonstrates how the values and belief systems at its heart were intentionally developed in order to divide the English along class lines at every level of the game.

Some of baseball's rebels are widely recognized, but most of them are either little known or known primarily for their baseball achievements—not their political views and activism. Many players, owners, reporters, and other activists challenged both the baseball establishment and society's status quo. Baseball Rebels tells stories of baseball's reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America's broader political and social protest movements, making the game—and society—better along the way.

Game On is a celebration of the trailblazing women opening doors for others, and a manifesto for women’s sports–a rallying cry to ensure the progress we are currently seeing goes from strength to strength.

FEAT DESC

Available once again for a new generation, the first volume in Arthur Ashe’s epic trilogy that chronicles the remarkable legacy of Black athletes in the United States—a major addition to our understanding of American history and the fulfillment of this legendary sports star and global activist’s lifelong dream.

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its wildlife. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays - spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden - were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature and writing about them. Warm, wise and full of wonder, The Dun Cow Rib is a captivating coming of age tale by one of the founding fathers of nature writing.

When George Brown spends the day at a water park, he ends up making a huge splash, just not the kind he intended. That's because trouble follows him like a shadow. It's not his fault. Really! Poor George is at the mercy of magic burps - burps that make him do wild and crazy things.

On the Water is a gorgeously written collection of essays that all take place on or near the water and pay tribute to the flora and fauna associated with those ecosystems. There are essays about the finer points of tickling rainbow trout in the streams of Normandy, and of eagles and ospreys fishing for bass while barely breaking the surface of the water. There are stories of droughts and floods, of dogs and boats, of worms and rattlesnakes, and even of catching and cooking soft-shell turtles that taste like osso-bucco.

Originally published in 1976, James A. Michener's explosive, spectacular Sports in America is a prescient examination of the crisis in American sports that is still unfolding to this day. With his lifelong enthusiasm for sports in evidence, the incomparable Michener tackles this subject thoroughly and leaves us amazed and appalled by what we've learned yet still loving the games we grew up on.

Was Cleopatra the last Egyptian pharaoh? Can you really make diamonds out of tequila? Is the platypus actually poisonous? Think you can spot the fake? Get your bullsh*t radar warmed up, because each entry in Spot the Bullsh*t hides one well-crafted fib among a pair of unbelievable truths. And it’s up to you to figure out what’s fascinating and what’s full of sh*t in science, history, pop culture and more.

Why is the athlete so important to us? Few public figures can dominate the public imagination with such power and authority. Drawing from art, literature, politics, and history, Something like the Gods explores the powerful grip the athlete has always held on the Western imagination. Amidon examines the archetype of the competitor as it evolved from antiquity to the present day, from athlete-warriors such as Achilles and Ulysses to global media icons like Ali, Jordan, and Tiger Woods.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

Batavia, New York—between Rochester and Buffalo—hosted its first professional baseball game in 1897. Despite decades of deindustrialization and evaporating middle-class jobs, the Batavia Muckdogs endured. When Major League Baseball cravenly shut them down in 2020—along with forty-one other minor league teams—the town fought back, reviving the Muckdogs as a summer league team comprised of college players.

The powers-that-be in auto racing in the 1920s, namely the American Automobile Association's Contest Board, prohibited everyone who wasn't a White male from the sport. Dewey Gaston, a Black man who went by the name Rajo Jack, broke into the epicenter of racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of White drivers. In The Brown Bullet, Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track.

Featuring interviews by former NBA player Etan Thomas with over 50 athletes, executives, media figures, and more - and interwoven with essays and critiques by Thomas - We Matter shares the personal tales and opinions of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, Dwyane Wade, Russell Westbrook, Steve Kerr, Oscar Robertson, Mark Cuban, Michael Bennett, Carmelo Anthony, Derrick Rose....

For centuries, the West has produced stories about the future in which humans use advanced science and technology to transform the Earth. Michael Rawson uses a wide range of works that include Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and even the speculations of think tanks like the RAND Corporation to reveal the environmental paradox at the heart of these narratives: the single-minded expectation of unlimited growth on a finite planet.

The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and Black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in US culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly Black sport, White fans - including especially himself - think about and talk about Black heroes, Black scapegoats, and Black bodies. Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999.

In January 2006, a month or two after my father died, I thought I saw him again - a momentary impression of an old man, a little stooped, setting off for a walk in his characteristic fawn corduroys and shabby quilted jacket. After teenage rifts it was walking that brought us closer as father and son, and this ghost of Dad has been walking at my elbow since his death, as I have ruminated on his great love of walking, his prodigious need to do it - and how and why I walk myself.